Documentation

Manage Cart Discounts Part 2

Elevate, May 20-22-2025, Miami Beach, Florida

Learn how to set up Cart Discounts in the Merchant Center.

  • After completing this page, you should be able to:

    • Use Cart Discount predicates and conditions correctly in common discount or promotion use cases.

    • Use case 4: Multibuy discounts

    Let’s look next at how a multibuy discount works in Composable Commerce. Shoes for Feet wants to set up a discount that moves a higher volume of their Sale category to clear out some space in their warehouse. They want to offer customers a further 20% discount on shoes in the Sale category when they buy 3 or more shoes. Composable Commerce’s Multibuy line item discount will let us set this type of discount up.

    General Information

    • Let's select the Buy X Get X with a percent off Discount Template, which will set up a multibuy discount.
    • Enter Shoes for Feet Multibuy as the Cart discount name.
    • Select Shoes for Feet as the associated Store, as this discount is related to Shoes for Feet only.
    • Enter a relevant ranking (you can use 0.4998 for now).

    Cart Discount conditions

    The conditions we want to have to cause the discount to be applied are:

    • Categories includes at least one of the following: Sale
    • Set this condition to True.
    Set Category to includes at least one of the following: Sale and set to True.

    Cart Discount effects

    For this kind of discount, we can see that Multibuy is selected, which opens up its own section of the UI for us to work with. Set the conditions as follows:
    • Categories includes at least one of the following: Sale
    • When customers buy 3 line items, they get 1 (the cheapest item of them) with 20% off. (The value here is determined by the Discount value in the UI section above the Target predicate)
    • Limit this discount to 3 times. (You can decide how many times this discount should be applied. Either set a cap or allow to be used unlimited.)
    Set Cart discount effect to multibuy. Customers get 20% off the cheapest item when they buy 3.
    In this use case, we are working with Line Items in the Cart. We are offering a discount to Customers when they purchase multiple quantities of the same Line Item.

    If we add two items of the same Product Variant, but there is some kind of difference between the two Product Variants, then those two Product Variants will be added to the Cart as two separate Line Items. For example, a type of T-shirt offered by a company may allow for custom embroidery, like a staff member’s name. Despite being the same Product Variant, if there is a change to any aspect of the Variant then the Cart adds them as separate Line Items and this will then affect the behavior of the Multibuy discount.

    Let's activate our discount and check in an order if we have set this up correctly:

    Cart Discount applied to Order.

    Nicely done!

    Use case 5: Customer Group specific promotions

    Our next use case looks at how to offer free shipping via Cart Discounts. Both Tread Trends and Shoes for Feet have decided to offer free shipping to their Gold and Platinum Customers when they spend over $50 in a Cart. They use Customer Groups in Composable Commerce to manage their loyalty tiers. Let’s have a look at how we can set that up using Cart Discounts.
    Remember, two methods exist to offer free shipping in Composable Commerce; using Free above in Shipping Methods, or Cart Discounts. We strongly recommend using only one option at a time in your Project. Using both Free above and Cart Discounts simultaneously can make it challenging to understand which Discounts should be applied to an individual Cart.

    To follow this use case, which focuses on setting up free shipping using Cart Discounts, you'll need to add to your Project setup the following aspects before continuing:

    • Two Customer Groups named Platinum and Gold.

    General Information

    • Let's select the Discounted shipping Discount Template, which will set up a shipping discount.
    • Enter Gold and Platinum Free Shipping as the Cart discount name.
    • Enter a relevant ranking (you can use 0.4997 for now).

    Cart Discount conditions

    Make sure to set up the following conditions:

    • Cart Total is equal to or greater than 50.00 USD.
    • Customer Group Key is one of platinum,gold. The Customer Group key can be copied from the Customer Group list as shown in the following image.
    Copy the Group key from the Customer group list.

    This is what the UI would look like to establish the above two conditions.

    Use Cart Total and Customer Group in your discount condition.

    Cart Discount effects

    As the two brands wish to offer free shipping, select Percentage off and enter 100 as the Discount value. Shipping has already been selected as the Cart discount effect and will apply the 100% discount value to the shipping costs.
    Apply free shipping to the cart discount effect.

    And when we check via an Order, we can see that a free shipping discount gets applied.

    Cart Discount applied to Order.

    There you go! A free shipping Cart discount for Gold and Platinum customers!

    Best practice: how to preview a Cart Discount such as this?

    You might find yourself wanting to preview a Cart Discount like the one above and make sure that it is functioning properly before allowing it to go live. Publishing this discount however would mean that any Customers belonging to those Customer Groups would start to be eligible for the discount. How could you preview this kind of Cart Discount with your stakeholders without making it available to all of your Customers at the same time?

    One solution would involve using Customer Groups. You could set a Customer Group that denotes if the Customer account is staff or not. Then in your Cart Discount, we can set a Cart discount condition to check if the logged in Customer matches the Customer Group condition. Now you can temporarily and safely enable the Cart condition/s and be sure that normal Customers don’t see the discount. Provided that their Customer accounts have the correct Customer Group associated with it, your stakeholders will now be able to preview that the Cart Discount is working as hoped.

    To make this discount ready for actual use, you would need to remember to remove the Cart discount condition prior to the campaign launching, and change it to the correct Customer Group.

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